GameFreak director Shigeru Ohmori spoke with IGN in a recent interview about the massively popular monster-battling-and-raising RPGs for the 3DS.
On the topic of the studio’s aim with bringing the franchise into 3D with fully polygonal visuals, he said:
“When we were making Pokemon X and Y, we really were trying to push the 3DS system to its absolute limits – which is what we thought we’d done. But when Sun and Moon came around, we completely redesigned the system, and actually ended up pushing the 3DS even further to what we thought was the most we could draw out of it.
With Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, we’ve tried to eke that out more and really, really push the system to its absolute limits, and we’re now feeling that perhaps this is the maximum of what we can get out. So we’re really treating Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon as the culmination of our work with the 3DS system.”
At this year’s E3, The Pokémon Company confirmed that GameFreak is working on a brand new mainline Pokémon game for the Nintendo Switch (although no concrete details have yet been provided). Now that Ultra Sun & Ultra Moon will bring the 3DS Pokémon saga to an end, we can safely assume that the Switch will become the next home for the franchise.
Ultra Sun & Ultra Moon will release for the Nintendo 3DS on November 17th.